I Am Completely Serious

This is what they taught me:

Hey! Do you hate yourself? Do you hate your culture? Do you hate your parents' culture? Do you hate your parents? Do you hate Westernization? Resistance to Westernization? Educational institutions, uneducated people, people of your precise level of education, the young, the old, the poor, the middle-class, landlords? (See: hating yourself.) Do you hate the government? Do you hate industry, the labor movement, and other people who hate the labor movement? (See: hating yourself.) Do you hate your sexuality and that of your friends, enemies, and acquaintances? Do you hate female sexuality, which is probably not the same thing as far as you're concerned? Do you hate and fear women, and does their mere proximity cause you guilt? (Sub-question: Are you a guy? You should be a guy.) Does every single thing which gives you pleasure, be it physical or emotional, eventually come to contribute to the toxic yet ultimately-narcissistic atmosphere of guilt and despair from which you draw your every breath?

THEN YOU SHOULD TOTALLY READ SOME MODERN JAPANESE LITERATURE.

The kind we teach in this class, I mean. There might be some other kinds, but they're probably about like, stupid crap.

(I declare a Natsume Soseki and Tayama Katai moratorium. Educational institutions, I'm not talking to you guys until you comply with my demands here. Tanizaki is still allowed as long as you promise to make fun of him. You can keep all the Mishima stuff except Confessions of a Mask. Yeah, I know - the only one you actually wanted was Confessions of a Mask, because you're a jerk. Sorry, jerk! Not happening anymore!)

On Monday, a bunch of us in Renaissance Lit took a trip to a prison to see the Shakespeare Behind Bars guys from this documentary rehearse, and talked to them afterwards. I didn't find out about the shootings in Virginia until we got back at about 11:00 at night. I'm kind of assimilating the whole visit and probably won't post about it more than this.

Apparently, though, I do feel comfortable talking about shitty news coverage of the shootings.

Professor Portentous let us get slightly off-topic in Confucian Classics today (yesterday), presumably because, you know, we're mostly East Asian Studies majors in there, and we'd darn well better have an opinion. Inse said he turned Fox on to see just how horrible their coverage was, and apparently O'Reilly said something along the lines of, "Exactly how did a South Korean get hold of two guns?" O'Reilly is big on the gun control. He feels it is an important issue worthy of serious thought. He also knows the difference between South and North Korea, and the state of the US's diplomatic relations thereto.

Prof. Portentous then got us back onto the subject of, you know, the Confucian Classics, and asked whether we could connect The Guy's behavior to any specific failure to follow Confucian guidelines. Silence. I say, "No." "No?" "No. We can't know that. I mean, we don't need to know that."

I'd looked at some of the links posted on BoingBoing and suchlike, but - this is why I need to stop reading BoingBoing. It fetishizes tragedy the same way the mainstream media does - why did I say mainstream. This is BoingBoing. It is mainstream. There are always a few good links in there when they're covering a developing story, but they're mixed in with a lot of shit, some of it insanely journalistically irresponsible.

For instance, they linked to some poor guy with a slightly similar name's Flickr page, and several students' accounts of what had happened on their personal sites - and some of these kids were clearly pretty rattled and only really posting to let off stress and tell their friends they were okay. They don't need this kind of exposure right now. And I like how, in the midst of her own reveling in tragedy, Jardin sanctimoniously links to this guy's discussion of the harmfulness of obsessive television coverage of school shootings. Nary a synapse fires in her head.

Okay. Anyway, I'd looked at some of the stuff posted on BoingBoing, but only some, and wasn't totally sure what the guy's nationality was. I did look at some of his creative writing. It looked like something the Something Awful guys would write.

In an attempt to change the subject (because I did not want to sit there listening to people vaguely talking about mass murder in terms of "ritual propriety") I brought this up in class. I said that whatever his ethnic background, his writing style indicated that he was "pretty assimilated into American culture," and that therefore the journalists who felt it necessary to constantly refer to him as "the South Korean shooter" were engaging in "rash speech" and "careless thought," and thus were failing to uphold their responsibility to society.

It's weird using Confucian vocabulary to say stuff, you sound very glib. (Unless you're Professor Portentous, of course.)

Aside from asking me to explain Something Awful, and asking for the URL on learning that it "satirized American culture," he then let me off the hook for a while, and other people cheerfully expressed their own dubiousness of Bill O'Reilly's chances of achieving authoritative conduct at this late point in his life (see Analects 9.22), and the sadly low likelihood of Fox president Rupert Murdoch's being recognized by all men as a sage king, and being followed as water follows the slant of the earth.

But I was serious.

(On the subject, I'm glad -ing Imus got fired. Mom, tell Dad I'm glad -ing Imus got fired. Dad did stop listening to him, like, a couple years ago, right? Tell him I have expectations of his taste.)

TITUS: Man, what the fuck is wrong with me?

AARON: No, what the fuck is wrong with me! (Me!)

*LAVINIA has no frickin' hands anymore.*

LITTLE LUCIUS: What the fuck is wrong with Lavinia?

TITUS: She's fine! *kills her because there is something fucking wrong with him*

AARON: I work at a goth club. Bartending. In the dark. THE NASTY SYMBOLIC RACIAL DARK THAT IS

*AARON'S KID is maybe Othello? Symbolically?*

SENSEI GOT TENURE!

Ohhh yes I knew this had to exist. I think I'm about to order it.

It looks like it's just one volume. The artist's name is Kihara Toshie - I'd never heard of her before, but when I googled the name I found some pages grouping her with the 49'ers. This manga will definitely be awesome.

Having been awake for 36 hours finishing a thirty-four-page research paper, what do I do? Do I... sleep twelve hours and eat a bunch of junk food? Or do I... sleep slightly less than six hours, then get up and read two more books on the same topic as the paper, and set about purchasing another?

Quick, LiveJournal people - what's a fairly recent manga where these high-school kids get pulled into another dimension, and one's a girl with secret powers or something who keeps zoning out and having visions (at least at first), and one's a dark-brooding type who I guess she's in a love triangle with, and one's the blond shouta-con type who's totally not in the love triangle? This is supposed to pretty popular or something, to the point that it's probably already licensed but they haven't got it out yet? (I need a third in my triumvirate of blond shouta-con types with Momiji and Hunny, for part of my gosh-darn paper. I've got some others for back-up, but they don't fit the pattern so perfectly.)

-

Edit 12/21/06 - It was Harukanaru Toki no Naka de.

I mean, today's just fired.

(The third round of power outages was the last straw.)

But it does prove something I've suspected since the beginning of the semester - no matter how infuriating everything else is, coding always calms me down. I just go into the zone. When I get frustrated about the program, it's not the big-smile "I WILL PUNCH ANY DEITY IN THE CROTCH" sort of thing I get from papers and whatnot. Your essay or your paper ninja ornament might have an problem that's just impossible to solve - but your algorithm won't.

Or, apparently that's how I look at it.

I just uploaded my last month or so's stuff to Flickr. (Though most of it's marked private.) When I was looking through my photos for the animal shelter ads, I thought this puppy picture was cute, but...



...I don't... it looks like it's going to transform. Into something bad. I don't know about this puppy.

(Fortunately, I don't think it's the one I actually used in the ad.)

GRRR-RAH!

F*******e yourself with cold metal implements, thou worthless debugger!

Grrrrrah...

(Edited much later because the time was randomly way off.)

I just found a fragment of a button on the floor of my room. I do not know what it came off of, but since I will probably get upset when I find out, perhaps this is for the best.

We watched a video on zen in art this morning, you see. I'm very zen about this clothes problem.

We watched the same video last semester, in Professor Portentous's early Asian civ class; it has monks who try to stay awake for seven days, and get hit with sticks when they doze off. When it was over, the professor asked us, "Did watching that video make you go to sleep, or get tense? When I watch the monks' training, oh, it makes me really tense!"

I think this must be kind of a Rorschach test kind of thing - because I am a lazy person, it just made me want to take a nap. The professor, however, is very serious and always kind of nervous and jumpy, and was probably worrying about the fact that she wasn't sure she could stay awake for seven days, and would get hit with sticks.

When Professor Portentous showed us the film, he left to do something else. Clearly he has attained satori.

(I bet Sensei would giggle.)